3.5/5 ★ – danbremner96's review of Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection.

Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection (2016) (PS4) (First Time Play) As a big fan of this series and playing number 2 countless times on the 360 era, I'd been itching to give this a go and have slowly been making my way through this remastered trilogy over the last 6 months or so. That said, even with large gaps between the games, this cradle to grave odyssey of Ezio Auditore da Firenze did ware out it's welcome by the end. It's a weird one. In terms of a remaster, the games better better with each one, with more stable frame rates, better visuals and load times. Despite being the best of this trilogy, AC2 is given the short straw and barely feels like an improvement on its 360/PS3 era predecessor. It often felt clunky, stuttered and was even prone to glitches that made me have to restart missions or checkpoints. An issue I had much less in the sequels. Story wise, it suffers the exact same with all these early Assassin's Creeds games. All the stuff outside the Animus is as boring as watching an old episode of Star Trek and the characters in the modern day are uninteresting at best. Things do come alive as we dive into renaissance era Italy as you perform a multitude of assassinations, build your own fraternity of young killers with a code and avenge your family. In true AC fashion, real life figures from history are along the ride to help move this fictional story along in clever ways, often incorporating real history to make things feel more grounded. It's just a shame they go and fuck things up by introducing space alien nonsense that just is a barrage of boring exposition that I could not care less about. There was some real demented crack fiend nonsense when the writers decided to add that. Each game does improve on itself gameplay wise as Ezio's (And AC1's Altair to an extent) skills expand and evolve through time. Climb continues to get smoother, faster and much more stable game to game. Combat still feels satisfying and fun once you get the hang of it, leaving you to combo an endless supply of hapless guards who get in your way. One thing however that doesn't improve is the stealth itself. In fact, it is borderline broken at times. I'd constantly lose missions for random reasons such as being attacked for simply walking? Groups you can stand in to hide will just randomly stop working and your targets seem to have this marvelous ability to see through walls. It got a bit frustrating. There is a variety of memorable missions, from large scale assaults, silent assassinations, rescues and even wonderfully over the top chases. A real showing of its time, but there are just far too many boring tailing missions that seemed to pop up far too often. As soon as I read the mission description and saw it involved following someone, I just sighed and grinded it out knowing at least it would lead to a better mission down the line. Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection is a minor improvement on its previous iterations, but it sadly not enough to justify being released. Maybe if they threw in AC1 as well to sweeten the deal, it would have been a better offer? Even so, these are still the same 3 very good games that still feature the highlights of the series and showcase a very different style of game that what is currently the series now. Glad to have revisited. Will pick up Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered at some point. 7/10 Dans